Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification - Hardcover

Petro, Melissa

 
9780593714997: Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593714997 ISBN 13: 9780593714997
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

In the spirit of Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist comes a courageous, in-depth investigation into the modern epidemic of shame in our society—what it is, why women are uniquely susceptible, and how we can shift the shame off our plates and live our best lives in an over-exposed, image-obsessed world.

For millions of women, shame is a vicious predator. It tells us we are less than, that we are unworthy. We try everything to escape shame—ignoring it, intellectualizing it, and even, ironically, shaming ourselves for feeling it. The reality is that women experience shame more frequently and more intensely than men—a direct result, as acclaimed journalist Melissa Petro explains, of a patriarchal culture that “urges women to feel bad about themselves, and then punishes them when they do.” Why can’t we figure out how to break the shame cycle once and for all?

In Shame on You, Petro takes on the issue of women’s shame directly with an unflinching look at the social systems that encourage women to believe we are deeply inadequate. From shame’s beginnings ( Maybe she’s born with it? Nope, it’s misogyny.) to its effect on our lives as adults (How the humiliation of “bad women” affects us all.), shame poisons our friendships, romantic relationships, and work lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Blending investigative reporting, science, literature, and hundreds of women’s personal stories—including her own shameful account of winding up as an unwitting New York Post cover girl—Petro offers us a new way forward. No matter what you do, she explains, there is no escaping being judged. And yet, the women we can become—sometimes as a consequence of shame, rather than in spite of it—are powerful indeed. And maybe that’s what others are afraid of.

"Melissa Petro writes so honestly and beautifully about the experiences and feelings that the world teaches women to bury. Here, she’s going deeper, unafraid to explore the rawest corners of blame and suppression. I feel sure this will be the exact book that women need." —Jia Tolentino

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melissa Petro is a journalist whose writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian, InStyle, and many other national publications. She was a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize, and she holds a bachelor in Women’s Studies from Antioch and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The New School. She lives with her husband and two young children in Upstate New York.

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1

Perfect Monsters

How Society Weaponizes Shame Against Women

My neighbor Penny tells me that she hits herself. A fortysomething-year-old, happily married stay-at-home mom to one exceptionally well-behaved toddler, she's not exactly the person you'd picture pounding her own fists into her head. Penny's the kind of woman who still irons her husband's shirts, a middle-class white lady living in the suburbs who deadheads petunias and handwrites thank-you cards. Penny's the woman in your friend group who makes the reservation. When there's a shitty job no one wants to do, she's the mom who happily volunteers first.

Self-harm isn't exactly what most consider normal, yet the gist of what started Penny's undoing will sound familiar to every woman everywhere: by her own account, Penny piles too much on her plate, then feels ashamed because she can't get it all done while the stress of trying to do so, she says, makes her act like "a monster."

It happened just this past Saturday, Penny told me, when she and her family were leaving for a weekend trip to the beach. Her husband, Greg, stood at the door, keys in hand, while Penny rushed around the house, packing and tidying, getting angrier by the minute until Greg expressed gentle impatience, and Penny's rage boiled over. She shouted at her husband, who-Penny said-just stood there, momentarily dumbfounded, before he started shouting back in defense.

"And now Greg and I are shouting at each other, and Hudson is crying, and then everyone is crying." Until, Penny said, she resorted to an old coping mechanism as a way of making it stop: "I went into the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the toilet, and started hitting myself in the head."

Penny's casual laughter belied the struggle to trust me and find the courage to be real. I held eye contact as she said it even as my pulse quickened. In our culture, we're conditioned to find another's shame entertaining, and I'm no exception. But I am aware this is a problem, and so rather than feel titillated by my friend's pain, I found ways to empathize. When Penny described her growing anxiety behind the urgent need to make the beds, to replace damp towels with dry ones, to quickly make and pack yet another snack, I could relate to my friend's perfectionism. I, too, have felt the frantic fear that I was forgetting something, the compulsive need to wash every last dish in the sink.

Still, I struggled to synthesize this new information with what I thought I knew about Penny. Of all the moms in our friend group, Penny and Greg appear to have the strongest marriage. They probably have the most money. Hudson's always the best behaved. Penny's the friend who never loses her patience.

She's the mom who always remembers to pack snacks.

Penny never used the word "shame" but I felt it as she told me her story. It pulsed quietly as she described paralyzing anxiety and self-hatred. Even as she shrugged it off casually and softened it with humor, I felt her pain.

Most of us have heard the term "shame spiral," coined by clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman to describe the loss of control triggered by an unsettling event.

That's what happened that day to Penny: failing to live up to society's outdated yet persistent image of the perfect wife and mother, Penny lashed out at her husband, which only made the feeling worse. Even as she felt angry with Greg for not being more helpful, she ultimately blamed herself and took responsibility for the whole situation-so much so that she felt deserving of punishment, which she then inflicted on herself behind the closed bathroom door.

Penny's not only a neighbor, she's also a close friend. Still, it's not unusual for people I barely know to tell me equally personal things. Benign conversations with relative strangers naturally gravitate toward the edges of the permissible. While those around us engage in polite conversation, we're exchanging stories about blow jobs we gave strangers in our twenties or all those extremely regrettable times we lost our shit on our kid.

I tell myself that it's because as a journalist, I'm trained to ask just the right questions. But I know it happens more frequently when people are aware of my own complicated past. These confidantes know that I have experiences in the sex industry, that I was publicly shamed for writing and speaking about these experiences in 2010, and that I still frequently write and speak publicly about these and other presumably shameful experiences.

It happens so often that I sometimes refer to myself as the "shame whisperer."

Whatever the cause, I seem to have a unique, even uncanny ability to Dr. Pimple Pop the darkest secrets out of people. And based on the number of confidences that I receive, this sort of unloading seems to be exactly what a lot of folks long for.

Don't get me wrong: most people would do everything in their power to avoid judgment, let alone humiliation. When we don't measure up to society's expectations of us, we feel deeply flawed and alone. These are intensely painful feelings. No one wants to feel shame.

At the same time, from my unique vantage point, I really do suspect most folks crave a less filtered life. How wonderful it would be if we could speak openly about our messiness, neither glamorizing it nor minimizing our pain. We'd all rather not hide aspects of ourselves and our experiences out of a fear of rejection. We'd all rather be completely ourselves, entirely honest and at ease, and still feel as if we belong. We all want to live unafraid to share who we really are and what's really on our mind. We all want to be the same person regardless of the audience-to have integrity, in spite of our fear. We are as desperate to embody our truths as we are terrified to do so.

So what's stopping us?

What Is Shame, Really?

Shame is a pernicious emotion, one that evades recognition even as it permeates every aspect of our lives. Defined most simply, it's the painful distress that comes from believing we haven't lived up to an expectation: When there is something we think we should have done or been or said or did-but didn't or weren't-shame takes hold. It doesn't matter if the expectation was realistic or impossible. I failed, we think, and it's my fault.

I asked my Facebook friends to describe how it felt, the last time they were struck by shame. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people misinterpreted the assignment. Instead of focusing on themselves, the majority of responders reflected the question outward: offering definitions, referring me to experts, recommending books. If they shared a personal shame story, they told me the details of what happened rather than how it had made them feel.

The fact that folks struggled to describe the physiological response in their bodies is unsurprising; we are not a culture accustomed to describing our feelings. Shame, in particular, defies words. This is because, as we are feeling it, shame seizes our limbic system while shutting down the parts of our brain that are capable of language.

Still, a handful of people answered the question the way I was hoping they would. My friend from high school, Al, described shame as a feeling of intense embarrassment, sadness, and regret.

"I have many memories that I look back on that make me physically ill," he said. "A lot of the time I'm intensely critical of myself after feeling shame, too, and that always turns into depression, even suicidal thoughts in the past."

"Physically, it starts with prickly heat on top of my head, neck, shoulders, back, and arms," Heather said. "Then my vision gets really clear but my hearing seems diminished, and my heart rate increases. Then there's the replay on a loop of whatever it is I'm ashamed of."

"It's more than feeling uncomfortable," Patty Ann said. "It...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593714997
ISBN 13 
9780593714997
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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